Automating Global Supply Planning at Biobest with Predictive Analytics

• Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms

• Agriculture
• Equipment & Machinery

• Quality Assurance
• Sales & Marketing

• Demand Planning & Forecasting
• Inventory Management

• System Integration
• Testing & Certification

Biobest, a global leader in integrated pest management, biological control, and pollination, faced a complex challenge of balancing production capacity and demand. The company operates in an industry characterized by long production times of up to 16 weeks, fluctuating levels of demand, and variations in crop yields due to their biological nature. This created a complex balancing act between available production capacity and demand. The company was also grappling with the challenge of treating each subsidiary as a separate business entity, which led to disjointed operations and inefficiencies. Additionally, the company was heavily reliant on Excel-based forecast templates to collect information from customers and distributors, which proved challenging to keep up-to-date.

Biobest Group is a global leader in integrated pest management, biological control, and pollination. The company provides a green alternative to pesticides by rearing beneficial insects and mites used by farmers to protect their crops against diseases and selling bumblebees for pollination purposes. Founded in 1987 and headquartered in Belgium, Biobest has 25 subsidiaries worldwide and employs 1,600 people. The company prides itself on providing tailored advice and technical support for farmers, with innovation and product quality at the heart of its activities. Biobest's mission is to be the most reliable supplier of bumblebees and crop protection products.

To overcome these challenges, Biobest implemented the Board Intelligent Planning Platform, a solution that unifies business intelligence, planning, and predictive analytics capabilities in a flexible, highly customizable environment. The platform enabled Biobest to create a holistic, integrated approach across the entire organization, replacing disparate spreadsheets and systems. The platform also automated administrative tasks, reducing workload. The implementation of the platform involved a five-stage process: initializing the process with system-built forecasts, collecting demand and available production capacity figures at a global level, aggregating and breaking down forecasts at different levels of granularity, allocating available production capacity to demand, and measuring and evaluating forecast accuracy. The platform also facilitated the fast sharing of accurate data throughout the business, improving efficiency and decision-making.

• The implementation of the Board Intelligent Planning Platform has transformed Biobest's operations, enabling the company to balance capacity with demand effectively. The platform has provided a single point of truth for all data and one platform from which to drive the global production process. This has enabled customers and distributors to contribute data directly to plans and forecasts, helping the organization assign demand to available production capacity effectively. The platform has also reduced administrative workload through automation. The company now has a unified, integrated solution for the entire process, replacing the disparate tools it previously used. The implementation of the platform has also paved the way for future improvements, with plans to include available production capacity in Board to look at the production yields and statistical control boundaries, among other things.